Infinity's End: Books 4-6, page 29
Cas shrugged. “I’m sure he could spare a few minutes at least. He’s a multitasker.”
Evie shuddered. “I hate thinking about doing it in front of so many other people. It’s hard enough when I’m not being gawked at.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Just do what I do when I want to talk to him. Go sit at a console and stare at it, pretending to work. It makes you much less conspicuous. And it isn’t like you need to be looking at him while you’re in that place, right?”
She shook her head. He was right, she shouldn’t be self-conscious about it. She was the acting captain; she had the prerogative to go and do as she pleased as long as it didn’t endanger the ship. Yes, this was something more of a personal nature, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t important. And if she needed a clear head in order to make decisions, then so be it.
“Get back to the bridge, coordinate with Rafnkell. I want to make sure we’re ready in case they pull a surprise attack on us. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Cas nodded, but his gaze lingered on her for a moment. She was about to ask him why when he turned and headed in the opposite direction for the bridge.
Evie didn’t bother with the hypervator as Engineering was only one level below them and half of them were still out anyway. But on the climb down through the access corridors she couldn’t help but be reminded of her time on Sissk, into the mines where all the kids played. One of the simmilists’ species was especially good at echolocation and often used the mines as a place to hide during games. Evie had still been young, but she wasn’t the first child where a combination of eagerness and a desire to be liked led to questionable decisions. She had gone in looking for the other kids, only to become hopelessly lost. It had taken hours for someone to come for her and she just remembered climbing deeper and deeper into those mines with little to no regard of the consequences or a way out.
She shook off the feelings, planting her feet firmly on deck ten and making her way down to Engineering. Damage control teams littered the decks attempting to reinforce the existing bulkheads and structures. A few nodded to Evie as she passed. She needed to do right by them until Greene was back. She wouldn’t let them down, even if she had to take a few more risks than she’d like.
Engineering was likewise a mess. More so than last time she’d been in here, which had been right before the life support had failed and she’d had to coax Sesster out of his cradle. If she hadn’t they would have lost their chief engineer to suffocation.
She felt something like a pressure on her brain and glanced up to see Sesster had taken notice of her. A few of the other crew had as well, but most went right back to work.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Tyler said, looking up from the main control station in the middle of the room. “I wasn’t expecting you. Is there something—”
“No, I’m here to see our chief engineer. It’s a private matter,” she replied.
He nodded. “Of course. Let me know if I can help.” She had to hand it to Tyler. When she’d first come aboard she never would have expected him to make it. He had been so wet behind the ears and with the added pressure of translating for Sesster she was sure his stress would have broken through before now. But he’d kept his cool during a crisis and managed to impress them all with his selflessness while Engineering was falling apart around them. She was glad he was down here with Sesster.
Evie made her way around all the smaller stations, toward the back and avoiding the large conduits that ran to the floor and ceiling which provided the ship with its undercurrent capability. Though she noticed one of the conduits was cracked. It was to be expected with as much stress as they were putting on the ship.
As she approached, she noticed Consul Zenfor standing off to the side; she’d been hidden by a console to where Evie hadn’t seen her when she’d first come in. The consul only stared at the information on the screen: some kind of Sil glyphs Evie guessed. But the consul wasn’t moving. Evie would have been concerned if she hadn’t seen the subtle rise and fall of her back.
“Consul?”
Zenfor blinked a few times then turned to Evie with a concerned look on her face. “Captain Diazal.” She glanced around the room, then back at her screen. “Two hours. That’s…concerning.”
“Are you alright?” Evie asked.
“Fine.” She glanced up at Sesster then back at her console again. “I need a break. I’m not making any progress on the engine enhancements.”
Evie gave her a sympathetic smile. “You looked like you were deep in concentration.”
Zenfor glanced to Sesster again. “Something like that. The commander and I have begun a formal relationship.” Evie’s eyes widened. “We find it mutually beneficial.”
“That’s…wonderful,” she replied. For once she was glad the comm towers were down. How was she supposed to include this in a report back to the Coalition? And how would they even react to a Sil becoming involved with one of the founding species? She knew it wouldn’t go over well.
“You sound upset,” Zenfor said. Evie wasn’t about to question this woman’s motives. The last thing she needed to do was upset her.
“No, just…you know what? It’s none of my business. Carry on.”
That seemed to satisfy her. She stood, made a curt nod to Evie, and left.
It isn’t what you think, Sesster said in her mind.
She glanced up at him. “Like I said, it’s none of my business. And that’s not why I’m here. I need to go back in.”
Are you sure?
“It gives me clarity of thought. I’m afraid without it, the hallucinations will start again.” After her final encounter with her “father”, she’d begun hallucinating during the day and couldn’t sleep at night. All that had stopped after she and Sesster shared the mind-space. And she hadn’t had any trouble since, but she’d also had a regular set of meetings with Sesster to continue to explore it. This was the longest she’d gone without some kind of experience and she was afraid of what might happen if she went too long.
Very well. Please take a seat and close your eyes.
Evie did as she was told, taking the seat next to Zenfor’s console. This was the part that she always found most nerve-wracking: sitting here, waiting for something to happen. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, waiting for the pull.
It was like being yanked through time and space on a tether hooked to a mark seven hypershuttle. One second, she was sitting in Engineering, perfectly calm, and the next she was standing in the middle of a nondescript desert, the horizon white in the distance against the gray sky. The ground beneath her feet was dry and cracked, as if this place hadn’t seen water in years. In the distance a figure approached, wearing a standard Coalition uniform. He was completely bald, with no evidence of hair anywhere and his eyes were as white as the horizon. “Captain,” he said in a soft voice.
“Commander,” she replied. This was how it always started. Sesster told her the man was her personification of him if he were human and might be how her true mind’s eye really saw him. She had to admit she found it easier to interact with him this way.
“How would you like to begin?” he asked.
“I think we can skip the preliminaries.” The scene shifted to them floating in the depths of space. They hadn’t traveled there, the desert floor had just vanished in an instant, with the two of them remaining in their places. And even though they were now surrounded by blackness and stars, Sesster still had something of an aura to him. A slight glow that was faint and powerful at the same time.
“I am glad you’re able to exert more control over these visions,” he said. She was too. The first few times it had been nothing but the same, she’d had to enter her old home on Sissk, encounter the visage of her father who then transformed into a creature she’d never seen before but had come to suspect was one of the Andromeda aliens. She didn’t know quite why she suspected that, but now that she’d learned about Vrij’s people she was anxious to see if she could extract any more information from the vision.
“Our new prisoner is a victim of the aliens,” she said, still floating. “His planet was the one we caught on the long-range telescopes.”
“Then it would be prudent to examine everything we can about what you’re seeing,” Sesster replied. She nodded. The next part of the vision always followed the first: they were transported to space and then shown a planet Evie had only seen here. It was like no other planet she’d ever seen before, as it was a terrestrial planet and yet it was massive enough to have rings. The atmosphere and what she could see of the surface was green and two small silver moons were locked in orbit. It was beautiful and also foreboding. She could only assume this was the alien’s homeworld, yet her evidence for such a conclusion was limited at best.
“Can you see anything you didn’t before? Feel anything?” Sesster asked.
She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to focus on the thoughts themselves. Where had these images come from? And why was she always shown the same ones? There had to be a reason for this. Each time before she’d been distracted by thoughts of her father as he’d played a prominent role in the first part of the vision. But she’d since learned how to move the sequence back and forth, exert her will over it and make it show her what she wanted. But nothing else was coming to her. It was just…the planet. “I can’t—”
“Quiet your thoughts. Try not to think about it too hard,” Sesster replied. “It’s not life or death. Just…think.”
She nodded, opening her eyes again. The planet gleamed like an emerald jewel and for a moment she thought she saw a shimmer near the twin moons. “There,” she said, pointing at the natural satellites. “I think I saw something.” But just as she concentrated on the shimmer, she and Sesster were yanked forward again, down through the planet’s atmosphere to the surface where they stood on a grassy hill, overlooking scores of the aliens. They all turned to her in unison, staring with their cold, gray eyes. “Dammit,” she muttered. This was the next part of the sequence, the king of the hill as she called it.
“You can take us back, just focus hard,” Sesster replied. She did, thinking back to where they’d just been. The scene changed before them and they were floating in space once more. “Now, focus on what you saw. Take us there.”
She nodded, focusing her mind on the moons. Slowly they moved across the reach of space until they were in front of the moons themselves. “These resemble the moons I saw at Omicron Terminus,” she said. There she’d found two moons who had been tidally locked with what seemed to be an ancient arch spanning the distance between them. Was it possible there was an arch here too, but invisible to her?
“What do you think?” Sesster asked.
“I think there’s something here I can’t see. And I think it might relate to how these creatures travel. But—”
They were yanked forward again at near-undercurrent speeds until they found themselves in another system. The primary star was a dark-blue O-type while the secondary was a yellow G type and the system had half a dozen planets in orbit. Evie recognized it immediately.
“Captain,” Sesster said, trepidation in his voice.
“I know,” she replied. “This is all new.” All the other times after her time on the green ringed planet she’d been transported to Omicron Terminus before the sequence started over again. But this was different. She’d seen this system though the sensor telescopes given to them by Starbase five. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the approaching armada, all the ships identical to the one they’d seen back at Omicron Terminus. As they passed the fourth planet in the system a pair of much smaller ships approached from its surface. Before she’d realized it, the armada had destroyed the smaller ships and turned their attention on the planet. Beams of orange light erupted from the ships and converged into one solid beam, plowing into the planet’s core. Within moments the surface began to crack and break apart, the entire surface of the planet shattering before smaller sections broke off. The molten core, exposed to the vacuum of space for the first time, expanded, then began to fall apart as well. It had taken minutes.
Evie caught more ships approaching from other planets in the system, hundreds in fact. This hadn’t been on the telescopes. But instead of turning their attention on the smaller ships, the armada trained their weapons on the O-type star itself, releasing another blast of energy. As soon as their weapons had finished firing, the entire armada disappeared while the star itself expanded in an ever-increasing fusion reaction. The result was a supernova that created a shockwave, igniting a similar process in its mate, destroying what few planets remained in the system and wiping out the smaller ships all in one blast.
It was a massacre.
Evie jerked forward, falling out of the chair. She threw her palms out at the last moment to keep her face from smacking the metal but as soon as she was stable she promptly vomited all over the ground.
“Captain!” Tyler came running over along with two of the other engineering crew.
Evie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “I’m fine.” She held up her hand as she gathered her bearings. The last time she’d seen that massacre it had been cold and detached, from hundreds of thousands of light years away. But this time it had been much more real, much more visceral. Like she’d experienced it in real time. She glanced up at Sesster. “What the hell was that?”
I don’t know, Captain. But I suggest you take a break. You were under for almost an hour this time.
“An hour!” Shit! She jumped up, shaking the nausea moving through her like a wave through sand. She checked the chronometer on the closest console. Yep, it was fifteen after. She was late for dinner with Laura.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Captain?” Tyler asked.
“I’m fine, Lieutenant,” she said with more heat in her voice than she’d meant. He and the others backed off, returning to their stations. But she couldn’t help but feel the eyes of the room on her. “I’ll get someone down here to clean this up,” she said indicating the mess on the floor. The last thing she felt like doing at the moment was eating again, but she’d made a promise.
I’ve already taken care of it, Sesster replied. Take a break, Captain. This was much more intense, for both of us this time.
She hadn’t considered that. Sesster had seen everything as well, and if he had a mouth he’d probably be vomiting all over the place too. But she couldn’t worry about that at the moment. She needed to get to her quarters. This wasn’t how she wanted this date to start off.
“I’ll…be back later and we can try again,” she said. Sesster didn’t reply in her mind, but she couldn’t help but think he was fine with it. One thing was for sure, Vrij’s people were in dire straits. Which could either make them the perfect allies or very dangerous. And she was going to have to decide which.
She only hoped she made the right choice.
Chapter Nine
Evie stirred, groaning at the headache that had permeated her dreams and sustained itself until she was fully conscious. She knew it was going to be a bad one and she’d have to make a trip by sickbay before hitting the bridge this morning. Even though sickbay was the last place she wanted to be. Despite her own personal bad memories of being there she didn’t like being so close to the captain’s unconscious body. It was creepy but why she couldn’t say.
She rolled over, reaching out and feeling the cold sheets next to her. Even though she’d been expecting it, the lack of someone else there left a pit in her stomach. Laura had tried to hide her disappointment the evening before, but Evie could still tell she’d been hurt even though she said she understood. And it didn’t help Evie hadn’t stopped going on about the visions and what they might mean and what they should do about them. Had she even asked Laura about her day? How she was feeling? She groaned again in frustration. She’d screwed up big-time and she’d need to find a way to make amends for it.
She dragged herself out of bed, her head pounding and took a quick shower, just enough for a quick rinse before getting dressed and ready for the day. She still wasn’t used to the captain stripes on her uniform and only hoped things would go back to normal in a few days. Weeks if necessary. She couldn’t be in charge and still deal with these visions at the same time. In fact, she probably needed to get back down to Engineering again to go through it all a second time but there just wasn’t any time today. And that was another thing. Before all their sessions had lasted maybe fifteen minutes at the longest. But this one had been over an hour. Had Sesster not noticed the passage of time either? Had they both been stuck in there in some kind of limbo while the rest of the ship had moved-on without them? She couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t like the thought of being lost in the mind-space forever. Next time she’d need to ask Sesster to set a timer. Or get someone else to wake them up. Zenfor perhaps.
Evie chuckled at the implications. Sesster and Zenfor. Who would have thought? Though it made sense. They were both alone on this ship, both having left their homes to help the Coalition. Both unique among all the other races onboard. But she suspected it was deeper than that. A shared kinship over something she didn’t quite understand. And that was fine. She was just glad she wasn’t the one who had to write the report on it. Greene would be floored when he woke up.
As she left, she took a glance at the sword hanging on her wall, the constant reminder that she was better than her father ever had been and that she was worthy to keep such an old family heirloom. At one time she’d found it something to be ashamed of, but not anymore. Now it was hers and vice versa. She planned on being buried with that sword.
Sickbay was quiet this morning as it was still early. The third shift hadn’t yet finished, and first shift was just gearing up so most of the people she passed were preparing for their days. And when she entered the medical ward she was grateful to see all the other patients had finally been discharged.
